Many people visit restaurants due to convenience, entertainment, and the ability to enjoy food and drinks not easily prepared at home. To provide for an enjoyable dining experience, one of the most important tasks for restaurants is the ability to timely take and fill customer orders. Restaurant customers can quickly become dissatisfied with the service of the restaurant when waiting too long for a waiter or waitress to attend to the customer to take an order for food or drinks. Similarly, customers may also become dissatisfied when waiting too long for food or drinks to arrive after placing an order. Many times the delays can be attributed to the restaurant being too busy, understaffed, misplaced order tickets, and oversight of the wait staff attending to the customers.
To alleviate some of the aforementioned problems, systems and methods have been created to aid in receiving and filling orders from restaurant customers. Such systems may include the use of ordering terminals that are available within the restaurant or placed at tables within the restaurant for use by customers to place food and drink orders. Customers may use the terminals to directly place orders without the need for a waiter or waitress to take the order from the customer. Upon placing the order, the list of items in the order is communicated to the restaurant staff and prepared for the customer. Examples of such systems are described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,912,743; 5,235,509; and 4,777,488. While such systems have benefits, the cost and size of such systems may not be appropriate in certain instances. For example, ordering terminals at each table may not be convenient for smaller restaurants and diners where space is a premium.
Other ordering systems have been created which utilize a customer's personal communication device, such as a cellular phone with text messaging or internet capability, to place an order. In these type systems, a customer may send an order via text messaging or emailing feature on their cellular phone. Examples of such systems are described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 7,174,308 and 6,473,739. While such systems provide for efficient ordering, such systems typically require payment information to be entered with orders as the customers are not registered in the system. The payment information may include credit card information or information regarding the customer's seating location when paying with cash. Other ordering systems utilizing customer's communication devices require pre-registration with the vendor to allow the placing of orders. The pre-registration procedures, whether via website or other means may be a time consuming endeavor thus deterring use for restaurants rarely visited by the customer, especially where a customer needs to register for multiple restaurants. As such, there is a need in the art for improved systems and methods of placing orders at restaurants with personal communication devices which allow for simplified customer registration.